Same Place, New Ice Bergs

We left our tent early and headed straight to the iceberg lagoon. It was pouring rain, so we skipped the planned boat tour, but we were amazed to see that everything looked totally different than yesterday. All the icebergs were new. I managed to find several chunks of ice that I could fish out of the lagoon to construct a model. Then we went across the bridge to wash the icebergs wash out to sea.

We were stunned to see ice block of various sizes strewn all over the black sand beach. They apparently got stranded when the tide went out. There were several large enough that I could stand and climb all over them. I was able to amuse myself for a couple of hours by chipping at the blocks and crawling all over them.

Unfortunately, the tide came in and washed all my toys out to sea! We walked up the opposite bank to check the view from the other side of the lagoon. Again, it looked like a different place. Seals kept bobbing up all over, except for when we had the camera ready. It was the same thing as the icebergs calving – my dad really wanted to get a video of that, but they happen so fast and never the one you are filming! We spent another hour or so just watching the icebergs drift, crash and change.

We next headed out on the trail to Svartifoss, just a large tour group of Germans started. This fall is the most famous site in the park and all day long huge busses pull up and hundreds of tourists hike up to see the waterfall. We saw five waterfalls in all. They were all little outlooks or bridges where you could get up close to the fall for a better view. Svartifoss was the nicest with giant piles of rock that you could climb on to get really close. It is mostly famous for its size and framing by huge columns of basalt. It was stunning from every angle, and we took thousands of pictures. All the falls were gorgeous, and the hike was exquisite. There were purple, yellow and white wildflowers all over the place. The boulders and cliff sides along the waterfalls were covered in brilliant green moss.

We also visited Lambhagi, the ancient lamb meadow. This is where they used to isolate the lambs during the day so that they wouldn’t drink all the sheep milk. It isn’t a meadow anymore; in fact, it is now a small forest with the tallest trees in Iceland! The only thing not perfect about our hikes in Skaftafell is the fact that it will not stop raining!